Grover Norquist: No GOP fingerprints on fiscal cliff tax hikes

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist said Wednesday that Republicans need to have “credible” separation from any tax hike as part of a deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff — in order to make a case to voters in 2014 and 2016 that their vision is distinct from that of Democrats.

The party can’t “have their fingerprints on the murder weapon,” Norquist told POLITICO’s Mike Allen at a Playbook Breakfast.

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Although several Republicans have expressed willingness to raise taxes as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations, Norquist dismissed the statements as “impure thoughts” and said he wasn’t concerned that any of them would actually vote to raise taxes.

“I’m not planning on losing the tax debate we’re having right now. But the tax issue will be more powerful in 2014, 2016 than today,” he said.

“If the Republicans lose in such a way that they have their fingerprints on the murder weapon, then you have a problem,” Norquist said. The party needs to “have clarity between their approach and the Democrats, and I mean credible clarity, not just ‘in their own mind clarity, this is what we secretly mean to do, even though we seem to be having tea with guys doing bad things.’”

He stressed that he did not want Congress to go over the fiscal cliff, but said negotiations should be on C-SPAN to get the best deal possible. Norquist argued that sequestration would not be a bad thing even though it would mean deep cuts to the Pentagon; the need to lower spending is too critical and defense shouldn’t be exempted, he said.

“You need to have this conversation in public, you need to be online so you can have the moral the higher ground,” he said. “This is kind of a déjà vu all … with the debt-ceiling thing. And people asked, ‘Do you want to default?’ And I said, ‘No, I want to save two-trillion dollars.’ Which is, by the way, what we did. And, by the way, we won that fight. We got the spending cuts and didn’t get a tax increase.”

He suggested Republicans should push for a one-year extension of all the Bush tax cuts and then demand that Congress come up with comprehensive tax reform as part of any deal to avert the fiscal cliff.

Norquist said by having negotiations in public, Republicans would be able to “change the playing field” from raising taxes to holding Democrats’ feet to the fire over spending cuts. Republicans could have the upper hand by challenging the President on not cutting spending.

“We have a spending problem, not a failure to raise taxes problem,” Norquist said.

Still Norquist said that revenue could be achieved through tax reform and economic growth. Raising taxes, he said, would not solve the country’s economic woes.

“I’m all in favor of real revenue, not imaginary revenue,” he said.

He would not directly answer Allen’s questions if there was wiggle room for Republicans to raise taxes without breaking his no-new-taxes pledge. But he did call Rep. Tom Cole’s (R-Okla.) proposal for Republicans to agree to a tax cut for 98 percent of Americans and negotiate the top rates later “an interesting tactic.”